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Updated: May 3, 2025
Along the top of this ridge a "planter," or "bull-tongue," is drawn by a single mule, making a channel two or three inches in depth. A person carrying a bag of cotton seed follows the planter and scatters the seed into the channel. A small harrow follows, covering the seed, and the work of planting is complete.
He would have given much a hundred times that day, and he almost said so a hundred times, too, to be at home, with the old bull-tongue plough behind him, running the straight rational furrow in the good bare open field, so mellow for corn, lying in the sunshine, inviting planting.
No one dreamt that hemlock ever would be marketable. And this was only five years ago! The tillage was as rude and destructive as anything we read of in pioneer history. The common plow was a "bull-tongue," which has aptly been described as "hardly more than a sharpened stick with a metal rim." Sometimes no harrow was used at all, the plowed ground being "drug" with a big evergreen bough.
How poor the soil was, Ike Hooden might bitterly testify; for ever since he could hold a plough he had, year after year, followed the old "bull-tongue" through the furrows of the sandy fields which lay around the log cabin at the base of the mountain.
Most of our farmers had neither horse nor mule. For the rough work of cultivating the hillsides a single steer hitched to the "bull-tongue" was better adapted, and the same steer patiently dragged a little sled to the trading post.
Then, down the entire length of the ridge the cotton-planter had followed, its two little wheels straddling the row, while the small bull-tongue in front opened the shallow furrow for the linty, furry, white seeds to fall in and be covered immediately by the mold-board behind.
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